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Windows 11 New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs
- megamike 4mo agoIs vlc still popular and widely used or is there a new 'kid' in town?
- functionmouse 4mo agompv is really good but a little light on the GUI; I recommend VLC for most people
- whatevaa 4mo agoSMPplayer is a frontend for mpv which I use and like.
- notpushkin 4mo agoIt also has MPC GUI mode for nostalgia :) On macOS, IINA is my go-to mpv wrapper nowadays, and last time I tried, Haruna is pretty good on KDE.
- rasz 4mo agoYep, highly recommend https://www.smplayer.info https://www.smplayer.info with dark skin :)
- BoingBoomTschak 4mo agoThere's https://github.com/mpvnet-player/mpv.net https://github.com/mpvnet-player/mpv.net for Windows lusers.
- hebelehubele 4mo agompv is great for scripting, though.
- thenthenthen 4mo agompv is super for lower spec hardware!
- magicalhippo 4mo agoWell there's an old kid in town, MPC-HC is still being maintained[1] to the great joy for us who dislike the VLC UX. [1]: https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc/ https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc/
- ReptileMan 4mo agoUgh... for the life of me I still can't understand why you can't click to play pause in VLC. Probably once upon a time it was about dvd, but the number of played dvds compared to pirated mk4 is probably one to a billion.
- jesuslop 4mo agoAgreed, Media player classic is the Winamp of video.
- tredre3 4mo agoIt's nice to see that someone revived MPC-HC (again). For a while MPC-BE[1] was the alternative. I don't know how they compare today, but the latter is still great. [1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/mpcbe/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/mpcbe/
- foresto 4mo agoIf mpv on Linux and MPC-HC on Windows, what is recommended on macOS?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- redsocksfan45 4mo ago[dead]
- neop1x 4mo agoI have been using mpv on MacOS too. I just had to create an app bundle for it a very simple swift wrapper which just runs mpv command...
- applfanboysbgon 4mo agoMPC is better if you're on Windows.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- AlienRobot 4mo agoPotPlayer is the new kid, I guess? Personally I don't like VLC because of the UI, so I've always used MPC.
- snvzz 4mo agoStill vastly prefer mpv[0]. 0. https://mpv.io https://mpv.io
- bl4kers 4mo agoIINA is much better on Mac https://iina.io https://iina.io
- functionmouse 4mo ago[flagged]
- rf15 4mo agoI switched to OpenSUSE this year. Good bye, Torment Nexus.
- MiracleRabbit 4mo agoSadly you have to install the codecs from external sites. This - at least for me - messes up the rolling release stuff at least one a month.
- epistasis 4mo agoThe "power user" group which was traditionally completely Windows users is seeing some shifts to Linux. Linus Tech Tips' recent Linux switch tests went really well for Linux: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KQFgWdiudo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KQFgWdiudo Linux on the desktop is close, and Windows is getting a lot lot worse.
- close04 4mo agoI think Media Player is there just to have a built in option. Can’t say I’ve ever seen anyone use it, even non-techies install some other player in my experience. The lack of codecs takes us back 20 years when everyone was installing codec packs. Both the Dolby and HEVC extensions now come from alternative codec packs. Not a real problem but does signal a degradation of the experience to the level that was usually considered the “downside” for Linux. Always a good idea to run alternatives to every software that might pull the rug from under you. Always be ready to switch when the experience starts to stink.
- herf 4mo agoHEVC used to be a capped license per organization, so not providing it in the OS seems really harmful and expensive. Has the cap changed recently?
- t1234s 4mo agoM$ knows the laws will change in their favor requiring a gov ID to boot a computer. This is how they will get away with crap like this.
- shaokind 4mo agoWhat? I can find at least one article from 2018 about HEVC being pay-walled? [0] EDIT: Also, what do they mean by "new" Media Player? It shipped in 2022 [1]. This article is garbage. The source article [2] is fine. [0]: https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-now-charging-hevc-video-extensions https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-now-charging-hevc-v... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Media_Player_(2022) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Media_Player_(2022) [2]: https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/06/16/microsoft-reveals-windows-11s-media-player-isnt-dead-but-legacy-still-opens-videos-instantly/ https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/06/16/microsoft-reveals-w...
- ftchd 4mo agoSo it started sucking almost a decade ago, checks out in my experience
- fuzzfactor 4mo agoThe article mentions W11 24H2 but that might have been the only update the article had if it was first published much earlier. Might have even been an advance warning about AC-3 even before 24H2 was released. Otherwise looks a bit deceptively like new findings just because the date at the top of the page says June 18, 2026 :\
- somat 4mo agoWindows media player always sort of sucked. I remember when I discovered mplayer. What a breath of fresh air by comparison. ostensibly worse, with it's barely there user interface. But... all it did was play video, it would play anything, no more faffing about with installing codecs or different programs for different formats. No annoying ui that tried too hard to look like a piece of hi-fi gear. I am not sure exactly what happened to it, it's maintainer moved on to other projects I imagine, it's current equivalent is probably mpv
- XzetaU8 4mo agoA solution for AC-3 is to get Dolby Digital Plus decoder for PC OEMs from here: https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/dolby_ac_3ac_4_installer.html https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/dolby_ac_3ac_4_inst... and then you recieve the latest update from windows store.
- est31 4mo agoRemoving HEVC support wasn't their choice but probably stems from the licensing pools increasing their prices [1]. Windows media player probably sees very little usage nowadays and probably even less for HEVC, when most content playback happens via streaming and browsers today. As for the RAM increase, well that's probably a consequence of the general trend of doing frontend engineering via JS/TS instead of using OS native frontend APIs. The advantages are more on the development side of those apps, i.e. you can hire JS UI devs way more easily, and probably LLMs know way better how to deal with a react app than an UML one. [1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/04/lawsuits-licensing-and-royalties-are-complicating-4k-video-support-in-gadgets/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/04/lawsuits-licensing-a...
- cf100clunk 4mo agoHEVC is provided by the official, licensed h265 standard. The open source ~HEVC-compliant codec library is x265 created by VideoLAN but was apparently not an option for Microsoft.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- cornstalks 4mo agox265 is an encoder, not a decoder. Also, being open source doesn't matter here: an open source library, even with a patent grant, doesn't give you a license to someone else's patents.
- izacus 4mo agoVideoLAN wants you to pay the royalty for x265 and you'll get sued by patent pools if you use it in a company (and are big enough).
- tredre3 4mo agoIt's not about the code. The open source implementations are also subject to patent laws, they just ignore them and put the responsibility on the user. And users don't know/care about it so in the end they get playback for free. That is why some distributions (RHEL derivatives, for example) do not ship support for many codecs out of the box and they make you jump to (admittedly simple) hoops to get it working.
- lemonish97 4mo ago[flagged]
- queenkjuul 4mo agoHEVC has been a paid add-on for as long as windows 10 has been around, iirc. Dropping AC3 does seem unnecessary.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- IronWolve 4mo agoDo people still use the K-Lite Codec Pack so their players have all the codecs installed? Or just use vlc?
- accrual 4mo agoI loved the K-Lite Codec Pack and CCCP (Combined Community Codec Pack) back in the XP days, especially while exploring MKVs and anime, but I virtually never run into a media file that VLC or MPC-HC can't play by default these days. Just drop it in and it plays.
- notpushkin 4mo agoIf I understand correctly, most of what K-Lite / CCCP did was wrapping libavcodec/libavformat for the Windows APIs, so native players could use them. VLC just ships with libavcodec included, so it supports all these formats. Not sure about MPC-HC nowadays (it used to use Windows APIs, but you’d usually get it with your codec pack installer anyway).
- plorkyeran 4mo agoK-lite originally was a giant mess of stuff that gradually got pruned down as the libav-based things got better and covered more of what was needed. These days it's just mpc-hc plus lavfilters and a few incidental tools.
- eproxus 4mo agoI still use K-Lite since they ship MPC-HC (a fork of Media Player Classic) that comes with really good HDR support and default configuration out of the box. If you don't like to have the desktop in HDR you can even configure it to automatically toggle on/off HDR whenever an HDR movies is played. The HDR support in VLC has been really lackluster. Maybe it is better nowadays, I don't know.
- dist-epoch 4mo agoIt stopped being a thing about 10 years ago. Mostly because everything is H.264, H.265, VP9, AV1, MP3 or AAC.
- y-c-o-m-b 4mo agoI don't think I've ever voluntarily used their shitty media player since the classic version. MPC-BE (some folks use MPC-HC) is my goto with VLC as a backup if certain codecs don't play nice with it. I'm able to use nVidia super resolution with them as well.
- orthoxerox 4mo agoI kinda have to hand it to Microsoft for dogfooding vibecoding with Copilot to such an extent. You can't say they encourage their customers to use a bad solution while doing something different in-house.
- contextfree 4mo agoThis app is a reskinned Groove Music, it was mostly written back in the early Windows 10 days (2014-2017) and long predates Copilot/etc. Even the Windows 11 rebrand as Media Player (2022?) predates that stuff, and it's barely been touched since then.
- make3 4mo agoOP was clearly a joke about Copilot making bad code
- contextfree 4mo agoit's a reasonable-sounding inference (if your only context is that there's a "new" Media Player and it's taking more memory) that doesn't apply in this particular case. A joke can be "funny because it's true"
- make3 4mo agoThis is just a pointer on how not to sound like Sheldon from TBBT or like Claude Opus 4.8 with thinking set to Max in casual conversation. Not saying it's better though.
- LollipopYakuza 4mo agoDidn't they just publicly make an apology for enshitting Windows over the last years, and committed to go back to building native app? I understand that project might have started way before the public statement but it really doesn't look good from a PR standpoint.
- contextfree 4mo agoThe Media Player the article about is a fully "native" app though (at least if you count C# as native). The Windows8.x version (Xbox Music) was web tech based; it in turn was a reskin/UI-layer-rewrite of Zune (which was C++), so they've already gone through a whole cycle of native->web->native with this. (The "new" Media Player still identifies as "ZuneMusic" in packaging metadata!)
- nekusar 4mo agoFor everything except sabotage-ware rootkit based games, Linux is the better solution for basically everything. Running MS Windows these days is like having a "kick me, hard" sign on your back. Or, you're treated like a money and data piñata.
- fecal_henge 4mo agoThere is a lot of professional software that locks people in also.
- ValentineC 4mo agoCan't wait for said professional software to eventually decide that Electron's the way to go as well, and make shittier new versions, but cross-platform. (I don't know if this can be sarcasm anymore.) What is Windows's moat among the business crowd? Is it the "can't get fired if they buy Windows" mantra? (Well, now they can get laid off anyway.)
- tredre3 4mo agoBeing Electron doesn't mean that the developer will release builds for all platforms that Electron supports. Discord took 3 years, for example. > What is Windows's moat among the business crowd? The moat is that it just works[1] will all of their software developed over the past 30 years, and support contracts/staff[2] is incredibly easy to obtain. 1. Contrarians will say that wine has better backwards compatibility than windows, but that's just cope and limited to a handful of games (and even then it's only because people made elaborate compatibility profiles for those specific games, those won't exist for internal apps). 2. Linux sysadmins are easy to obtain, but dedicated staff to support a desktop linux fleet is still fairly niche. There is some overlap in skillset and sysadmins can learn, of course.
- rustcleaner 4mo agoQubes OS is nice for that. Set up a plain vanilla Windows TemplateVM (Windows Firewall whitelisting in/outbound connections), clone the vanilla template for each subset of applications, then make a bunch of AppVMs which point to those cloned templates.
- tosh 4mo ago> The modern Media Player is said to use around 377MB of RAM when idle, compared to roughly 103MB for the old player—about 3.5x as much memory while doing absolutely nothing. even 103MB sound like a lot for doing nothing
- wvbdmp 4mo agoIdk, it is a media player. I’m not mad about it keeping a ton of cover images and audio stubs in memory for immediate playback. Plus probably metadata of the entire library, with various indices. Makes sense to me. We might expect newer players to cache less because SSDs are fast, but perhaps this is offset by the increasing use of network storage, whether it’s internet-based or a local HDD NAS.
- goodmythical 4mo agoIdk, using the same file I got mpv: 144mb, vlc: 144mb. Reccomendations for other lower ram solutions?
- Const-me 4mo agoWhy is that HEVC video extension is required? As a part of the user-mode half of the GPU driver, GPU vendors ship media foundation transform DLLs to use HEVC hardware codecs. Don’t AMD, Intel and nVidia already pay patent royalties? I expect them to include into price of the GPUs with hardware support i.e. all of them made in the last decade.
- jjcm 4mo agoI think what I find fascinating about this is it's a native app with no web version... and they still decided to write it in html/js. This is after Microsoft's commitment to rebuild things in WinUI. Don't get me wrong, I totally understand the barrier of friction that native presents compared to html/js, but that barrier has lowered so much with the advent of agentic development. It just feels like things weren't thought out.
- prmoustache 4mo agoWhich barrier?
- contextfree 4mo ago1. It does not use HTML/JS. It is a fully "native" app (at least if C# counts as native) written with C# and UWP/WinUI2 XAML. Actually, Xbox Music in Windows 8.x had a web tech based UI; when it was rebranded as Groove Music in Windows 10, its UI layer was rewritten. Xbox Music itself in turn was a reskin/rewrite of the UI layer of Zune (which was C++) so it's already been through full cycle of native->web->native. (The "new" Media Player still identifies as "ZuneMusic" in packaging metadata!) 2. it's not "after"; Groove Music was largely written in 2014-2017 in the early Windows 10 days, and even its rebrand as Media Player in Windows 11 happened in 2022, and it's barely been touched since then.
- breve 4mo ago> at least if C# counts as native It can count as native. You can turn on Native AOT compilation: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/native-aot/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/nati...
- bigstrat2003 4mo agoThere isn't even really a barrier. It's not actually hard to do UIs in WinForms, nor WPF, and I assume not in WinUI either. The problem is that a lot of people are just too lazy to even try to step out of the HTML/JS comfort zone, not that it's hard to do.
- yokoprime 4mo agoI rarely use widows, but i feel like windows media player is only there to check a box that windows has a media player. Most people dont play local videos anyway, and those who do use something else like VLC.
- orphea 4mo agofeel like windows media player is only there to check a box that windows has a media player This is probably not far from the truth. Although, I think it's still an important box to check, even if only 2.5 boomers are going to use an out-of-the-box media player.
- Fraterkes 4mo agoKind of a pity that we used up the phrase "a fractal of bad design" on php, it's so applicable to much of the stuff coming out of MS. I've been using PowerBi for a few weeks now and I'm sometimes impressed by the novel ways it finds to suck.
- anaisbetts 4mo agoThis article is likely AI slop, none of this is "news" and I'm pretty sure that this is just factually Not Accurate. Windows 11 is not shipping a new media player, it has the same one as it has since Win10. Codecs have like HEVC/H.265 always cost a very small amount of money, in order to pay patent owners. Again, it has done this for years now.
- contextfree 4mo agoThe rebrand of Groove Music to Media Player was a Windows 11 thing, so it sort of did ship a "new" media player. It also still ships the old one though (as "Windows Media Player Legacy")
- SSLy 4mo agoAs a certified MSFT's antifan, I’ve noticed Apple’s Music.app uses roughly 580 MiB of RAM for comparison.
- encrypted_bird 4mo agoOoh, I love learning new words. What's an "antifan"?
- paulryanrogers 4mo agohater?
- encrypted_bird 4mo agoAre you making a joke or are you serious?
- SSLy 4mo agoA portmanteau of anti, and fan. 'Hater' wouldn't be exactly the same.
- krieger_857 4mo agoitunes on windows still leaks memory like a water hose, it can go up to 4gb listening to online radio
- nottorp 4mo agoHmm anyone remembers mplayer? Last update seems to be from 2022 at mplayerhq.hu. Used to be the go-to that played basically anything years ago.
- chronogram 4mo agompv is that. In 2010 mplayer2 forked from mplayer, in 2012 mpv forked from mplayer2. It's all I've used since.
- nottorp 4mo agoOh thanks! I lost track because vlc became "good enough".
- naturalmovement 4mo agoWell it's written in managed code, what do you expect? Windows core apps used to be pure C++. Cry long enough about "safe" languages and expect to take the RAM hit.
- pjmlp 4mo agoWinUI, WinAppSDK are built on top of WinRT, which is C++ for the most part. That is the whole joke about it, Windows division tried to kill .NET with their updated COM based on Vista victory over Longhorn, and the whole AddRef/Release makes it slower than WPF applications. https://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt-everything-old-is-new-again/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt...
- contextfree 4mo agoI think Groove Music/Media Player is C# though
- pjmlp 4mo agoIf it is using WinUI is it as much C# as using doing AI in Python is Python. See WinUi and WinAppSDK repos on Github.
- lpln3452 4mo agoReducing this to a simple language fanboy war is a massive oversimplification. Recent memory bloat and performance issues happen everywhere, whether it's C++, Java, or React. In most cases the real culprit is architecture and implementation not the language. Such as embedding browser engines just for cross platform UI. You talk as if language choice dictates performance but even C# allows active stack allocation for optimization. Conversely C++ becomes a bloated mess if poorly implemented. In fact terrible C++ code has caused issues for decades. Ultimately the root cause is that as users' available memory expanded, developers (or rather, management) stopped caring about memory usage. This approach is finally hitting its limit and alternatives are emerging.
- Telaneo 4mo agoI love VLC <3
- WalterBright 4mo agoWhen Windows 7 got an update, WMP decided to delete all the folder.jpg files for my CDs that it had earlier downloaded when I ripped them.
- cadamsdotcom 4mo agoEvery day there seems to be a new reason not to use Windows and still people keep using Windows! The suffering will continue until there are good alternatives.
- phs318u 4mo agoI wonder how the memory footprint would compare between vanilla Windows 11 (latest) and Windows 11 with all user apps substituted for memory efficient native apps. I know there are several third party “de-bloat” flavours but I believe they focus more on disabling redundant services.